It's Baltic

Blue skies - that was yesterday when there was still some cloud. It was very clear and consequently quite chilly today.

There's snow on the hills to the north, as you can possibly just about see on this picture, but there's been no precipitation here.

Sun setting on the way home from school. As the weather's been so good I've been making the kids walk. I've no objection to driving them on wet days as we're not that close to the school but on a good day it's a nice walk.

It's worth it for some fresh air and to appreciate a bit of nature, or such as we see.

The huge advantage of cold clear weather is actual sunlight shining through the freesias on my windowsill!

Apologies to anyone flooded in England but we did have the horrible weather last week - got to enjoy the nice weather when we can!

It's knitting group night so I'll be wrapping up and heading out in a bit - plenty of knitted warm things to choose from, shame none of them match! One of these days I'll be co-ordinated (don't hold your breath).

Skies

 This was the sky just as I picked the kids from school at 3 o'clock.

And this is the sunset just before we set off for Miss M's dance class, so at about 4pm.

We don't often get beautiful sunsets here as cloud tends to be the dominant feature, but tonight's was a cracker - it got even better, and at one stage the horizon was a really delicate apricot colour, but obviously I was driving and couldn't take any more pictures. But really, driving into a beautiful sunset made up for not being able to take pictures. I should have had some kind of stirring soundtrack, but actually it was the usual low-grade bickering from the back.

Success! Tonight, while I watched I'm A Celebrity and had my feet numbed by a sleeping cat*,  I have Turned A Heel, having done some arithmetic to get it right as I'm doing a 72-stitch sock and the pattern is for 64. I'm perfectly capable of arithmetic, it's just I'm still at the stage of thinking that turning a heel is Magic, so working out what the decreases and turns are actually doing is a bit... intimidating.

 (Dubiously) But it looks as if it's worked.

I have no idea what the next line of the pattern means though. I keep re-reading it, hoping that the meaning will jump out at me.  I'll have to dig out the pattern I usually use and compare it.  I really do need a pattern that's written for the completely clueless. But, the rest of the foot should be pretty quick and easy anyway!



* You should have heard the cracking noises as I walked upstairs after having had Small Cat sitting on my ankles for two hours. Quite alarming really.

Eye of partridge

Oh blimey, I'm so slow on these socks! And this is only the first one.. But I'm onto the very lovely eye-of-partridge heel now.

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I'm liking the effect it makes with the hand-painted wool. Only trouble is not sure which slip-stitch row is next. Best leave it to the morning and daylight I think.

Here's Larger Cat burying his nose in the blanket last night. My feet are just below his nose so that's okay then, vote of nasal confidence from the cat.  Both cats love this blanket. It's Small Cat's turn tonight. Larger Cat just tried to pick a fight with her but the lady wasn't for budging.  My spot of an evening, like that of Sheldon, is one end of the settee.  But mine is better because on the small table next to me is my 'puter.  My feet are on a foot-stool, there is a  blanket on my legs (I get cold) and a cat on the blanket  - because I am the cats' spot. Decadent eh?   I can write my blog, watch television and be a piece of furniture for my pets all at the same time. On that comfortable note, good night!

So I failed

I missed a day's blogging.  I just couldn't manage a post without a picture, not two days running!

But I've sorted out the thing with the pictures, and in no particular order as Dec would say, here are some for you.

The ghostly galleon, the picture I was going to use on my last post. Bit wobbly and blurry but surprisingly good given the low levels of light.

After the kids went to bed last night, instead of blog-posting, I spent a lovely evening with my cat and My Beloved (that's in no particular order of course). We watched I'm A Celebrity (naturally), we debated who we thought would leave the jungle, who we think will win, and of course who we'd send into camp. I'd send Ray Mears and Brian Blessed and Hugh Fearnley-Whatnot and similar people, and watch Ray blithely ignore the Snake Rock and Croc Creek camps and lead his Merry Men and Women (though I haven't thought of any suitable women yet) off into the (actual) jungle with the panic-stricken production crew and Ant and Dec trotting behind.

After that we watched an episode of Castle (love this), then an episode of Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated. The latter is an overlooked gem. The kids love it so we've seen quite a lot of it but it was good to watch it without them for once. Really a programme that produces a horror-writer character called HP Hatecraft who has taken to writing teen supernatural romances, well that's got to be good.

In other thrilling news I've bought some beads for the ends of my scarf. Aren't they pretty? So far they've been used to help Miss M with her maths homework (division! They're onto division already!), but one day I'll get round to sewing them onto the scarf and all will be pretty.

Right, must finish. Celebs and bugs and rats, oh my, in five minutes...

Drab

I've run out of picture space apparently so I need to upgrade before I can add another picture. So a pictureless blogpost, blimey that's a bit tricky.  I find it really difficult to write without a picture to focus my thoughts.

Tonight's post was going to be about a photo I took this evening while waiting for the train home from my knitting meet-up. The half-moon was visible through the bare branches of a tree and looked, well, quite spooky (don't worry, the picture's not great, you're not missing much). And as often happens the words 'the moon was a ghostly galleon' popped into my head. They're from the poem 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes which we studied at school once when looking at imagery and creative use of language and stuff like that.

There are a set of gloriously creepy illustrations for it by Charles Keeping, who coincidentally taught my dad at art college. It's funny how you get an impression of someone from their work, and I always imagined him as an austere sort of person for that reason, but no, Dad says he was far from it.

An entertaining pastiche of The Highwayman is The Highway Rat by Julia Donaldson - yet another book I enjoy reading to my daughter, and worth a look.

And that's all folks! Good night :-).

Being Katie Morag

Do we all know who Katie Morag is? Ah, good :-). I enjoy reading Katie Morag books to my daughter - they're a bit of nostalgia for me as I was once a child who stomped around beaches in my wellie boots. Now that my brother is scanning the old slides I'm entertained to notice that actually I'm more Katie Moragish than I'd remembered.

I had Big Boy Cousins:

That's me, my dad and my little brother with them.  Looks a bit steep doesn't it?

Granny Island is a brilliant tractor-driving character and should I ever be a Granny I'll model myself on her (yes, I can drive a tractor), but I didn't have a Granny Island or a Granma Mainland myself.  I had just the one Granny who lived in Ireland (Granny Ireland then?)  - here she is visiting us:

That's me and my brother with her on one of the beaches (for there were several) in the immediate vicinity of wir hoose. When I think of myself as a kid I mostly remember wearing trousers, which, so I thought, makes Childhood Me different from Katie Morag with her stylish skirt-and-wellies look. But as you can see I obviously did wear skirts some of the time. Just not with wellies in this case.

The picture below is possibly not that clear but if you click on it you'll see me striding purposefully around in my wellies. Clearly a child on a mission.

Brr, looks chilly.

And finally, just for the fun of it, here's a picture taken on Victoria Pier in Lerwick, looking inland obviously. I don't know what year - late 1960s? Early 70s? Mid 70s?  Anyone know about cars? I'd ask My Beloved but he's gone to bed.  I am of early 1970s vintage but I wasn't paying that much attention to cars as a kid, and I'm not enough of a car buff to guess. Great cars though - they look the way cars look when they've been drawn by me. I never could draw cars.

What's interesting about this picture is that from that angle, aside from the cars not much has changed about this view since then, or hadn't last time I was home. If you have a look at the Lerwick Harbour webcam, one of its angles is not dissimilar to this one. Don't look too closely at the zoomed-in webcam shots of the boats in the harbour swaying up and down and side to side.. you'll get queasy. Or is that just me?

Strange missives

A curious little message that came home in Miss M's schoolbag. To explain, school lunches run in a 3-week cycle and the kids are given a menu showing the options for each day of the three weeks. It all works very well and my kids are happy to have school lunches when they like something on the menu and packed lunches the rest of the time. It certainly makes things easier for me.  But when the new winter menu started a few weeks ago we were slightly mystified by one of the choices - 'savoury cheese sandwich'.

'Savoury cheese?' we thought, 'when is cheese not savoury..?'.

All became clear when this note came home - I can imagine there have been some complaints from outraged six-year-olds who were expecting a normal cheese sandwich! Sounds mingin'...

Talking of food, I should be writing a shopping list. Instead I'm typing this with the small cat stretched out on my legs. We're watching the highlights of yesterday's Grand Prix and she appears fascinated.  While we've been watching tv this evening I've also been knitting my Circles socks but I'm fairly sure I've just gone wrong somewhere so I'm going to leave it for tonight, in case I mess it up even worse.

This is a very tedious post isn't?